Why you just can’t…hit the gym?
The key insight that you have been missing all your life
“Tomorrow, we’ll hit the gym”, you texted your friend before heading for bed. But it’s been 6 months since already and you are reminiscing about the text, wondering where went the motivation.
Hidden in this simple scene is the core of the answer to the question - why you just can’t exercise? But as we will see, the answer is not easy to come around. It needs a reset of our brain wiring which we will bring about by unfolding the big yet underrated question - what does it mean to exercise?
Let’s see what are some immediate images that come to our minds when we think about fitness -
Instagram influencers sweating themselves with intense workouts shoving motivational hyperboles down your eyes.
Youtube influencers with aesthetic videos (which feels unreal) showering you with perfect routines, diets, and workout plans.
Gym advertisements displaying toned bodies on larger-than-life banners luring you into their membership programs with massive discounts.
Supplements companies bombarding your phone with provocative engineering based on your biological data extracted from various data brokers.
Fitness tech companies trying to sell you the latest gadget that will make you more biologically efficient for maximum productivity.
Can you smell something common? No? I’ll tell you. There is no “you” in all these scenarios. Nobody really cares about what health means in your life, what is your story about diet and fitness and how you can get to your desired place? You want to put the effort into improving your health, but you don’t feel seen. All these prescriptions are targeted toward a generic persona who wants to shape itself into a stereotypical image of a fit person. Is the desire original or its subtle coercion? To answer that question, we need to ask ourselves - What is fitness?
What the heck is fitness anyway?
Let’s be honest. When we think about fitness, the first thing that comes to our mind is the aesthetics of a toned body. And for a good reason. We have been fed the same since our childhood. But we don’t realize that these people that have their bodies cut in the form of greek gods have their whole life dedicated towards it. Since it’s not practical for everyone, it’s a false perception of fitness.
The fundamental requirement of our bodies is a basic amount of movement – so that our muscles don’t atrophy. But the narrative that has been fed to us about what a fit person looks like makes us feel guilty for not doing enough. And honestly, for most of us, the gym is more of an excuse rather than an aid. Because consistently going to the gym is so hard for most people that the excuses seem plausible to us. But the fundamental question remains - do you really need a gym to motivate yourself to exercise? Did your mom ever need the motivation to cook every day? Did your dad ever need the motivation to stroll the market for hours?
It’s sad that the idea of a healthy life has been reduced to fitness in the contemporary sense. The word fit-ness itself implies the experience of being fit, which is analogous to our modern way of life where everything is sold to us as experiences. I like to make sense of it in this way -
Fitness is an experience. Exercising is a practice. Movement is dharma.
Fitness is an experience because it doesn’t only consist of you being fit. It also consists of the experience of you sweating in the gym, how you look in certain kinds of apparel, the image of your intense fervor in life, the aesthetic of your body that sets you apart in society, etc. The essence here lies in outward projection. The experience is the image that looks from a third person’s point of view.
Exercising is a practice. Our bodies and our minds are vast territories that go unexplored for life. And they are always in flux. Just like the ideal path through a terrain can only be discovered once you cover it many times, finding the right exercise requires trying your hand at different forms. But the goal remains the same. To reach the most natural state of your physical expression. And you can only achieve that with honest practice.
Movement is dharma. Not moving is non-negotiable. The first human moved for food before it could reason for it. That fact still holds true today. Although it sounds pretty obvious, it boggles my mind that nowadays we try to think of every possible reason not to move. If you think about it, behind all the technology that we have invented, one of the core reasons was to minimize time wasted due to movement. But we took it too far and now that is biting us in the back, metaphorically and literally.
These subtle differences, which are not so subtle once you see through them, lie at the core of your confusion about what being fit means for you. Among this confusion, the best salesman selling you the perfect snake oil wins. But you are only going to get frustrated when your fitness vocation doesn’t align with your motivations.
Okay, we have clarity about what fitness means. Now the question is how and where should you start your fitness journey? But before that, we need to familiarize ourselves with the hard truth.
If you’ve got a floor, you’ve got a gym.
If you’ve got a floor, you’ve got a gym
The warriors in the Indian Puranic age and more recently Indian pehlwans used only a mace (gada) for a full body workout. It used to be a rigorous training routine. However, the important thing to note here is not the instrument, it is the minimalism of gadgets for successful exercise. That the development of your body doesn’t need fancy gadgets or permission from an authority or a dedicated place.
For our hunter-gatherer counterparts, exercising was not a separate activity. Since everyone relied directly on nature, survival itself involved the full range of motions of our muscles. We were naturally fit without trying to be fit. The modern idea of fitness is isolated from any attachment to nature. Rather than being an essential part of an integrated existence, it has been ripped out of any relatability with our daily lives. We have to coerce ourselves into an isolated vessel without any familiar context. It has been systemized, marketed, and weaponized.
The gym is the manifestation of thousands of years of knowledge for how to be maximally fit in the easiest of ways. Machines are the artifacts containing the most compressed knowledge about building a perfect body. So, gymming has an inherent motive which is to seek the perfection of human anatomy. Hence, it becomes important that you deeply enquire about your own motivations. Do you really want perfect human anatomy or do you just want to be healthy? With that frame, you’ll soon realize that the gym represents just one of many facets of a healthy lifestyle.
At the end of the day, exercising is self-expression. Then it totally depends on the kind of goal you want and where to express yourself. And more importantly, whether you are consciously choosing the mode of expression or you’re being coerced by clever marketing and mimetic instincts that feeds on your confusion.
After all, what’s stopping you to alter the environment around you like this? Trust me for once, you can totally do it.
Or this, if you are really creative. You get the idea.
There should a strong enough reason to compel you to exercise and there must be a trigger. But for that trigger to serendipitously hit you, you must have a strong distaste for your existing state of well-being. And for that, you must have the definition of self-respect for your own existence. These are the necessary ingredients for the core insight (that we will unfold at the end) to make sense of the why behind exercising.
Human beings don’t exist in isolation. Even if you are a person who lives alone, your conscience is shaped both by the individual you and the social you. The social gaze is always there at the window of your mind, shaping your decisions and actions at every step. That’s why, even if you can muster enough self-respect to come out in the world and express yourself physically, there’s another far bigger enemy waiting for you at the street corner, which is social insecurity. A lot many mighty soldiers have fallen to the feet of this bullying beast.
So, what to do about it?
Shatter the facade, begin anew
Since we spend most of our time online now, social insecurity has become one of the biggest detriments when it comes to acts of physical expression. And the fact that social media allows you to engage with other people through anonymous identities, the need for physical expression gets further reduced.
But there’s another fact about social media than can actually prove useful if you want to start your exercise journey. See the uncomfortable truth about social media is that no one really cares about how you look unless you can provide some transactional value or you have some social influence. And that can be liberating. Sharing your fitness journey on social media has the lowest barrier of entry. Nobody is really a danger since you are literally setting an example for like-minded people.
The key is to realize that social media dynamics are a lot less restricting than real-life social dynamics.
When it comes to exercising, mimicking other people is still one of the best ways to jumpstart. But we tend to forget that as we live in the age of over-intellectualization where every little thing must be dissected and analyzed before taking a decision. Exercising is the last thing you need to intellectualize upon.
Imagine you were living in a community where everyone exercises. Due to the ways human social dynamic works, you couldn’t help but do the same. Unfortunately, we don't live in communities anymore. Sure, we have digital communities nowadays, but we don’t live in them. You still need your real physical self to mimic physical activity. And right now, most online communities are conversational in nature.
The point is, you really need to unlearn your malice about social media and see things for what they are. Every other day, there is a new avenue springing up on social media where people are taking charge of their fitness together. All you need to start is a #hashtag and a willingness to drop your imaginary guard.
I’ll write about my own experiment on Instagram where a couple of people participated in a pushups challenge and hopefully shifted their lives in a positive direction.
The gym is not a one-size-fits-all solution to improve your physical and mental health and the wild variety of exercise modes that people are pursuing on social media proves that.
One size fits all? Hell no
You have to realize that the essence of exercising is self-expression. And it’s your responsibility to find the mode through which you can best express yourself, with maximum gain. Just like different people are naturally skilled at different sports, the same is true about exercising. The gym is just one mode of exercise.
Think about it. There’s a reason evolution has made us so flexible with our structure. So that we can exercise them however we want.
Ultimately, it boils down to incrementally getting yourself attuned to the beat of nature that flows through you. There comes a point in any mode of exercise at which you stop resisting the forces and simply lean into the course of action. It almost becomes automatic. The thinking part of your brain goes away for a break and your body and mind come together in sync with the order of nature, your nature. At this point, exercise becomes meditation.
Watch this interview of Bruce Lee to understand this:
You need to realize that over the millions of years of evolution, nature has stored potential knowledge inside each one of us. To unfold all that knowledge to our own advantage, we have to act. Practically speaking, you have to spend energy exercising your muscles. Since this is a non-negotiable requirement, you can only find out the best mode of spending your energy once your start somewhere. You can’t reflect without acting. As the famous philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard said - Life can only be lived forwards, but it must be learned backward. So, here’s the kicker:
Energy spent through the right mode of exercise is energy rewarded.
Remember, your job is not to impress anyone, or even yourself. Your job is to get more and more attuned to the rhythms of your body and your mind. But to find out the vocation to which your body is most attuned, you need to act. To become water, you must flow.
So, how do you reach this natural state? What’s missing?
You need a coherent story to bind exercising and your life together.
The crux that we all miss
Most of us don’t have a convincing story for why we should exercise. It almost feels like we are coerced into fitness. We are rational beings driven by stories. When our minds can’t establish a good enough reason to head to the gym, we drop it eventually. Think about it. The core requirement of exercising is to move your body. And you should be able to do it anywhere. However, we have our minds pre-programmed that we must get into one of the popular forms of fitness to have any glimmer of success. There’s no immediate relatability with our individual motivations. Your well-being is always projected into the future. It is more reflective of work than self-expression. The story feels incoherent. And here lies the crux.
You can’t exercise because any kind of self-expression needs a convincing and coherent story.
People who radically transform their fitness levels in a short span of time are exceptions, not the norms. But if you observe closely, they always have a convincing story. And they don’t waiver from it. That’s why David Goggins manages to motivate millions of people by chanting the same story every day. That’s why people like the ones linked below who are in their 60s and 70s still exercise daily, rather enthusiastically.
Here’s an important note - The story doesn’t need to be convincing to anyone else but themselves.
Nowadays, storytelling has been taken over by brands on social media. You just have to post your latest fitness tracker and the story comes to the surface. The catch is that, in essence, you are not telling your story. You’re telling the story of a brand. But you can’t fool the brain. Subconsciously, it knows about what’s real and what’s manufactured. The brain needs relatability. Just like you place yourself in a story while reading a book, similarly, you need to place yourself in a story of your fitness journey.
When you have a good story, you can pragmatically reason about the past and predict the future. It helps in answering the second essential question regarding exercising which is -
What is the effect that exercising will have on your life?
You should clearly visualize the before exercise and after exercise version of yourself – so that you don’t have to think about motivation every day. It should be there whenever you need it. The more you are near your story, the clearer the image of your future self becomes, and the easier it gets to devise a plan. When the picture is clear, motivation is automatic. See? It’s a reinforcing loop. Just like with any honest ambition in life.
Personal story time: I was dragged into the gym by my friend when I was in my first year of graduation. I have always been an athletic kid and a very successful one, but there came a point when I lost all touch with any physical activity – to win in the race of the education system. Several years of lurking on the edges of depression and the trauma of very strict parenting had left me dislocated from my natural element - which was physical activity. When I had my first exercise session in the gym, I quickly realized that at that point in my life, it was the most natural course that my mind and body desperately needed – to put me back on a convincing story arc. I lost touch with exercising again when I was trying to win a different race, the race of the corporate industry. But then COVID hit and with the chaos and uncertainty came an even bigger realization. I was reminded that life and death are just two sides of major forces on planet earth and the only way to make your life worth living is to imbibe it with a force, a kind of vitality that fuels itself, without the fragile spark plug that is human motivation.
Summing up, here’s the summary of why you can’t exercise.
You don’t have a clear idea about what exercising means for you.
Due to the years of conditioning, you have a very rigid narrative about exercising – while in essence, exercising is just another form of self-expression.
Contrary to popular assumptions, social media is a good tool to break the barrier of social insecurity and become accountable for your fitness journey.
There is no one size fits all solution when it comes to fitness. You need to find the mode of exercise which best aligns with your natural inclinations.
You never realized that convincing and compelling stories are the fuel that fire the engine of your life.
Stories are your guardian angels when you get stuck in the maze of life. Stories have latent powers that wait for the right time to unleash themselves into your world. A good story is not only a credible way to go about your life, it’s your dharma.
Hope this sparked some clarity regarding the purpose of exercising inside you. I really hope to soon hear about the long-awaited beginning of your fitness journey. 💪
Please share your thoughts in the comments and reach out to me on Twitter at @poetofgrindset or via email at letsharden@gmail.com.
so well written. Eye opening read.